City councilor: Form task force to monitor problem properties

A vacant house at 603 Chelmsford St., Lowell, has sparked a motion by City Councilor Marty Lorrey for the city to establish a task force to deal with problem properties.

LOWELL -- When City Councilor Marty Lorrey walks the city's neighborhoods to talk to residents, he says they often highlight to him a nearby vacant and blighted property they have concerns about that they would like to see addressed.

A recent example was 603 Chelmsford St. The single-family home has sat empty for years, and neighbors told Lorrey they wanted to see the place boarded up to make sure children don't get inside and that it's not home to crime.

Notices have been issued to the property by the Health and Building Department over the years for minimum maintenance and code violations, but most were returned undelivered, according to city officials. The city is now considering taking the property through tax-title foreclosure and hoping a new owner will purchase the home and fix it up.

This building on Pawtucket Street in Lowell could be considered a problem property.

To help Lowell officials bolster their ongoing efforts to address such properties so they don't drag down the neighborhoods, Lorrey has filed a motion for Tuesday's meeting calling on City Manager Bernie Lynch to establish a problem-property task force similar to one Boston has.

The task force initiated by Boston Mayor Thomas Menino includes 10 cabinet leaders. Members of the different departments, including Inspectional Services and the Police Department, team up to identify properties with records of code violations and criminal incidents.

A problem property is defined as one that has had a combined four or more calls or complaints made against it in the preceding year to the Police Department for criminal offenses, to Inspectional Services for unsanitary conditions, or complaints to the commission that handles noise issues.

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Once identified as a problem property, the city can increase surveillance of the property by the Police Department, increase fines for code violations and seek foreclosure proceedings if the property owner owes back taxes. The city also publicly posts the addresses of the properties online with the names of their owners.

In its first year, Boston's task force investigated 144 properties, and named 18 of them problem properties.

The city's investigative and enforcement efforts resulted in a 55 percent reduction in police calls for service to those addresses, as well as a resolution of a number of sanitary-code and building-code violations, according to the panel's recently released first annual report.

In Lowell, Lorrey said, the task force should include the police chief, fire chief, head of Development Services and possibly a fourth member chosen by the city manager.

Monthly meetings could be held to identify any problem properties according to established guidelines to and discuss enforcement, Lorrey said. He envisions Lowell's task force having just as much success as Boston's has had.

"It gives us a standing team of people to tackle these issues, no matter who is the manager or who is in those positions," Lorrey said. "It also gives us set guidelines, set rules and set penalties.

"If you have even three properties across the city taking up most of the calls, they will be targeted now," he added.

Assistant City Manager Adam Baacke said the city already has a number of efforts under way to address blighted properties to try to minimize their impacts on neighborhoods, including strategies similar to Boston.

Those efforts include Development Services working closely with the Fire Department and Police Department on a regular basis to target properties with fire-safety hazards, potential criminal issues and code-compliance concerns.

The registration and property-management requirements as part of the city's vacant and foreclosing ordinance also allow the city to track such properties and monitor their compliance with code.

But Baacke said Lorrey's motion, if successful, could help the city in the long run with its ongoing efforts.

"Councilor Lorrey's proposed motion may be valuable as a vehicle for institutionalizing the partnerships among the three departments so they are not dependent on the current staff who have worked very collaboratively with one another even without a formal 'task force,'" Baacke wrote in an email.

The city has other tools in place to focus on the most blighted properties, including a receivership program in which courts appoint a party to improve the properties and recover their costs through liens on the properties.

Police Superintendent Kenneth Lavallee told The Sun his department examines repeat call locations at its bi-weekly meetings to review crime data and develops strategies to deal with the problems.

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